A Poem: Onions

to be sure, she felt him at her
elbow in the crowd of the
kitchen or at black midnight but
most of all when the trees
changed their leaves from green
to gold, tossing away one dress
for another and, finally, bone-
naked through the winter and
the rain, grey arms, fingers
scratching at the sky, forlorn, as if
to say: once I was beautiful, once
your sun shone upon me, in my
plot of fine-mowed grass, bordered
by a walk of slate-blue hexagons,
so orderly

(my timber and my roots are
the self-same ones you loved and
stroked so many months ago)

what changed? she cannot tell,
but still catches a whiff of
him, resonant as
onions heavy upon the breath